The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen

He grew up on a wheat farm, in a flat country ringed by hills. Sam Zemurray was born in 1877, in the region of western Russia once known as Bessarabia. When he mentioned the nutritional value of bananas in interviews, he added, 'And of course it's delicious.' Putting us at a further remove from Zemurray is the fact that the kind of banana he saw in Selma in 1893, the banana that made his fortune, the variety known as the Big Mike, went extinct in the 1960s. Tossing it and saying, 'Wonderful.' In future years, Zemurray always spoke of his product the way people speak of things they truly love, as something fantastical, in part because it's not entirely necessary. In this version, Sam peppers the salesman with questions: What is it? Where did you get it? How much does it cost? How fast do they sell? What do you do with the peel? What kind of money can you make? But none of the stories mentions a crucial detail: did Zemurray taste that first banana? I like to imagine him peeling it, eating the fruit in three bites, then tossing the skin into the street the way people did back then. If they were spoken of at all, it was as an oddity, the way a person might speak of an African cucumber today. The American banana trade had begun twenty years before, but it was still embryonic. The most likely version has Sam seeing that first banana in the wares of a peddler in the alley behind his uncle's store in Selma. In some, he sees it amid a pile of bananas on the deck of a ship plying the Alabama River on a lazy summer afternoon. He rushes inside, grabs the owner by the lapel, and makes him tell everything he knows. In some versions, Sam sees the banana in the gutter in Selma, Alabama, where it's fallen from a pushcart in some, he sees it in the window of a grocery and is smitten.

There is much variation in the telling of this story, meaning each expert has written his or her own history meaning the story has gone from reportage to mythology meaning Sam the Banana Man is Paul Bunyan and the first banana is Babe the Blue Ox.

As it was his first banana, I imagine it situated on a velvet pillow, in a display alongside Adam's rib and Robert Johnson's guitar. It is seen from a great distance, then very close, each freckle magnified. In some versions, the original banana is presented as a platonic ideal, an archetype circling the young man's head. In the lore, this is presented as a moment of clarity, wherein the future was revealed. Sam Zemurray saw his first banana in 1893.

The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen